Islam

The subject of identical twins has been on my mind ever since I read a magnificently creepy thriller called Ice Twins by SK Treymayne – a pseudonym meant to sound like a woman, but it fact belonging to the novelist Sean Thomas. I read it because Thomas is in the new Spectator Life explaining how the pressures of the market push the writers of psychological thrillers towards female-sounding names – so he (sort of) turned into a woman to make Ice Twins a bestseller, which it duly became. The book is tightly plotted, meticulously researched and I urge you read it – but what grabbed my attention was the subject of that research:

So who is poisoning all the doggies, then? I assumed, when the first horrible reports came through from Crufts, that it was either the Russians or the Muslims. Russians seem unable to go more than a few days without feeling the need to bump somebody off. Perhaps they’d run out of businessmen to kill and thought, during this morale-sapping lacuna, it would be wise to keep their hand in by murdering a few dogs. We were told almost endlessly during Channel 4’s coverage of this year’s tournament — won this year by a small and unpleasant black thing, some sort of painfully sculpted terrier with an embittered expression on its face — that

I have always treated the ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ event with the scorn it deserves. Not least because each year this fantasy prize for a fantasy concept is run by a British Khomeinist organisation laughably named the ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission.’  The nominees include anybody opposed to the agenda of Islamic extremists, including Muslims.  Of course each year, whilst laughing at it, those of us who are regular nominees also regard it as being to our great good fortune that the IHRC is a British charity operating in the United Kingdom rather than an Islamic charity operating in an Islamic country.  If the latter were the case then rather than laughing

In the 1970s it was called ‘Radical Chic’: the toe-curling tendency of well-heeled liberals to consort with revolutionaries in the hope that the glamour of violence would rub off. The phrase was coined by the journalist Tom Wolfe in a satirical article he wrote for New York magazine about a fundraising party hosted for the Black Panthers by composer Leonard Bernstein. Cage, the Islamic-focussed advocacy organisation, is the new equivalent of the Black Panthers and, for years celebrities, journalist, politicians and human rights organisations have been happy to assuage their liberal guilt and bask in the reflected glory of the Guys from Guantanamo. Vanessa Redgrave, Victoria Brittain, Peter Oborne and Sadiq Khan

It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves. I only know that they made no similar attempts during my adolescence, or if they did I didn’t notice. I vaguely recall one young lady in my school class telling me, when I was 14, that she had engaged in sexual intercourse the previous night with a boy from a neighbouring town. ‘What was it

Poor Mohammed Emwazi. One day he’s your average ‘beautiful’ young man, nose buried in his computer studies books, looking for a job and looking for love. The next he’s being harassed by the security services, so intensely that — BOOM — he weeps and wails his way to the deserts of Syria where he changes his name to Jihadi John, dons an Islamic ninja outfit and starts chopping people’s heads off. Happy now, MI5? See what you did? Shame on you for pushing this studious, handsome London lad to become the Charles Manson of the Middle East. That, at least, is a rough outline of the script being hawked by